Assessment of wind characteristics for energy generation

Wind technology in Turkey has gained considerable maturity over the last 5 yr, and wind energy projects are becoming commercially attractive in the country. In practice, it is essential to describe the variation of wind speeds for optimizing the design of the systems resulting in less energy generating costs. The wind variation for a typical site is usually described using the Weibull distribution. The two Weibull parameters of the wind speed distribution function, the shape parameter k (dimensionless) and the scale parameter c (m/sec), were computed from the wind speed data for Aksehir in Konya, in Central Anatolia in Turkey. The average wind speeds for the site ranged between 1 and 2 m/sec for most times the wind blows, while the maximum wind speed recorded was 17 m/sec. The yearly values of k and c at this site varied between 1.756-2.076, and 2.596-3.444, respectively. Rayleigh distribution gave a better agreement with the actual data than that of Weibull distribution. The results would give useful insights to engineers and scientists dealing with wind energy.